INSET week has a very particular flavour for Computer Science teachers. Everyone else is worrying about seating plans and display boards. You're wondering whether the Year 10 machines still have the right Python interpreter, whether the network team quietly blocked something over the holidays, and whether the projector in the room you inherited is going to last until October. It's a lot. Here's the short version of what I try to actually get done before the kids walk in.

Read your schemes of work like a stranger

Six weeks off is enough distance to see your own SoW properly for the first time. Open the KS3, GCSE and A Level plans and pretend you've just been handed them. Ask three questions:

• What actually landed last year? Not what you taught. What stuck.
• What did you quietly skip? There's always something. Decide now whether to bring it back in or cut it honestly.
• What are you teaching out of habit rather than because it's the best use of the hour?

You don't need to rewrite anything in the first week. Just annotate. The rewrite happens at half-term when you have real evidence.

Do the tech walk before the kids do

This is the bit only CS teachers have to do, and it's the bit that will sink your first lesson if you skip it. Before Monday:

• Log into every classroom machine you'll be using, not just one.
• Run the tools you actually teach with. Open the IDE, run a short program, save a file to the network drive and open it again.
• Test the projector, the sound, the visualiser, and (quietly) the fire alarm test schedule, because it will always be during your best lesson.
• Print a backup. One paper worksheet that works when everything else doesn't.

The lesson that dies because the IDE won't launch or the shared drive quietly moved is the lesson kids remember for the whole year.

KS3 hooks first, syllabus second

Year 7 don't care about the National Curriculum. They care whether Computing is going to be interesting. Open with something they'll tell their parents about: a Scratch demo that does something silly, a physical algorithm with the class as the data, a "guess the output" starter that actually makes them argue. The spec content will still be there in week two.

The same goes for Year 8 and 9, honestly. If the first lesson back is a recap of file sizes and units, you've told them exactly what to expect for the year.

GCSE and A Level: set the tone in week one

For exam classes, week one is where you install the non-negotiables:

• How they take notes.
• How they submit code and what you expect it to look like.
• How you mark, and how quickly they'll get things back.
• What "stuck" looks like: a low-stakes retrieval task on last year's content, purely so you (and they) can see what actually survived summer.

That retrieval task is worth more than any recap lesson. It tells you where to spend September.

Protect your energy

The year is a marathon. Pick two things to do well in September (for me it's usually one KS3 unit and one exam-class routine) and let everything else be "good enough" until October half-term. You cannot rebuild every scheme of work, redecorate the room, launch the club, and sort the department's assessment policy in the first three weeks. Every September I've tried, I've regretted.

Be boring in the best way. Turn up rested, know what you're teaching tomorrow, and leave something in the tank for Wednesday afternoon.

If you're a CS teacher or Head of Department heading into a new year and want to compare notes, get in touch on LinkedIn. Good luck with week one.